Wu school

Wu school, Wade-Giles romanization Wu, group of Chinese painters of the Ming dynasty active in the second half of the 15th and first half of the 16th centuries. They were scholar-artists who, in their “literati painting” (wenrenhua), perpetuated the personally expressive styles and attitudes of former artists such as the Four Masters of the Yuan dynasty, in contrast to their contemporaries of the Zhe school, who perpetuated more conservative styles.

The Wu school was named after Wu county (xian) in the region of Suzhou, in Jiangsu province, where the painters worked. Among the artists included in the group are Shen Zhou and his student Wen Zhengming. Generally, their paintings are quite subtle, but that subtlety veils great variety and imagination—Wu school works are characterized by a sure, light brushstroke used to define painterly and structural complexity, learned allusions and poetic inscriptions, and very thin, delicate colouring. These artists created paintings more for their own and their peers’ intellectual amusement than for a larger public. Some well-known painters, such as Tang Yin and Qiu Ying, lived in the area and knew the famous members of the Wu school, but they cannot easily be grouped with them because of their sometimes differing styles and interests.

Click anywhere inside the article to add text or insert superscripts, subscripts, and special characters.
You can also highlight a section and use the tools in this bar to modify existing content:

Add links to related Britannica articles!
You can double-click any word or highlight a word or phrase in the text below and then select an article from the search box.
Or, simply highlight a word or phrase in the article, then enter the article name or term you'd like to link to in the search box below, and select from the list of results.

Note: we do not allow links to external resources in editor.
Please click the Web sites link for this article to add citations for
external Web sites.